WHY I DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT VALENTINE’S DAY

Dear Valentine’s Day,

Fuck right off.

You heard me.  I don’t need you.  And no, it’s not because I’m single.  That’s actually the last reason I’m tossing you out like so much garbage this year.  It’s because you never really fit the largeness of love in the first place…that life affirming, enduring thing we all strive to achieve and keep.

“Build a wall around your heart and never love again,” suggested a friend of mine after a particularly trying break-up.  It was piss poor advice.  And thank God I never took it.  You see, I’m romantic, to the bone.  And nothing external could ever change it.  Not the betrayal of a cheating partner, not a lonely bed on a cold winter night and especially not the fact that I’m single on the candiest, rosiest, chocolatiest holiday of the year.

I love love.  And I’d go further to say my one true vice is women, and loving them.  I can give up booze, red meat, and eschew gambling…I can avoid over indulgence in sweet things and generally lead a sober life.  But when I fall in, I fall in deep.  A haze sets in, emails go unattended, I lose touch with friends.  I forget to eat.  My every thought becomes this person.  Who they are, what they are thinking, what they must think when waking, then walking through this world.  And when this love is unrequited, I suffer the suffering of a thousand broken hearts.  I walk with a broken back.  But when a new love is reciprocated it is as if every winnowing pop song is my soundtrack; how sweet and simple life is.  Such joy.  I become a floating thing.

And I want to buy those greeting cards filled with feathery sentiments and hand them out to passersby.  In love, each day presents itself like a luscious poem, rhyming with synchronicity.  And because of it I want to go to museums with my lover and gaze at art…discuss and drink all that beauty. I want to lay on sandy beaches with her, with silent fingers laced.  I want to watch her face as she watches the sun set. I want to love her from the inside of my body to every last inch of the outside of her body and back again.

I do not despise Valentine’s Day because I love less.  I despise it because I love too much.  And not being in love with one person in particular, well, it’s ok…you see, my eyes are wide open to this vast, warm world around me, conspiring towards complexity and fulfillment.  I’m reminded that I can also be just as in love with myself.  Sit on sandy beaches gazing at sunsets alone, synapses firing, alive with all my senses…experiencing it all within the framework of my body and not that of another.  And this feeling can be just as sublime.  Just as ‘in love’ as anything.

So Valentine’s Day, you misguided old fool, I’m tossing you aside because you diminish love.  And don’t we all know that by now?  Cos love isn’t just candy hearts and diamond tennis bracelets.  Love is also a simple act in this complex time and space… and in one breath or a lifetime or a nighttime we can experience the true expanse of the emotion.  Love is a touch and it’s a feeling and it’s 3 fucking D.  It’s whatever it is in any particular moment.  And yes, perhaps it’s a plush bear holding a sateen heart, “I wuv you,” in cursive.  Maybe it’s a bag of oranges.

So this Thursday I am going to pause to reflect on love, not because it's Valentine’s Day but it's because it’s a day.  Any day.  And each day, I let it in.  And each day, if I choose, I make ceremony with sunsets and chocolate and wine and human touch.  Or just the touch of my own two hands, laced silently.  And I understand that this love is enduring.  And not just one day.  It is all days.

So fuck off, you.

But don’t forget…I love you,

Helen